choosenim installs the Nim programming language from official downloads and sources, enabling you to easily switch between stable and development compilers.
The aim of this tool is two-fold:
- Provide an easy way to install the Nim compiler and tools.
- Manage multiple Nim installations and allow them to be selected on-demand.
To select the current stable release of Nim:
$ choosenim stable
Installed component 'nim'
Installed component 'nimble'
Installed component 'nimgrep'
Installed component 'nimpretty'
Installed component 'nimsuggest'
Installed component 'testament'
Switched to Nim 1.0.0
$ nim -v
Nim Compiler Version 1.0.0 [Linux: amd64]To update to the latest stable release of Nim:
$ choosenim update stableTo display which versions are currently installed:
$ choosenim show
Selected: 1.6.6
Channel: stable
Path: /home/user/.choosenim/toolchains/nim-1.6.6
Versions:
#devel
* 1.6.6
1.0.0
#v1.0.0Versions can be selected via choosenim 1.6.6 or by branch/tag name via choosenim #devel (note that selecting branches is likely to require Nim to be bootstrapped which may be slow).
Download the latest Windows version from the
releases page (the .zip file, for example here is v0.8.4).
Extract the zip archive and run the runme.bat script. Follow any on screen
prompts and enjoy your new Nim and choosenim installation.
There was also a third-party project to provide an installer for choosenim, you can find it here (note that this isn't vetted by the Nim team so you do so at your own risk). This project did however target the old repository for Choosenim, so it doesn't work with this repository without modification.
curl https://nim-lang.org/choosenim/init.sh -sSf | sh
wget -qO - https://nim-lang.org/choosenim/init.sh | sh
Optional: You can specify the initial version you would like the init.sh
script to install by specifying the CHOOSENIM_CHOOSE_VERSION
environment variable.
Similar to the likes of rustup and pyenv, choosenim is a
toolchain multiplexer. It installs and manages multiple Nim toolchains and
presents them all through a single set of tools installed in ~/.nimble/bin.
The nim, nimble and other tools installed in ~/.nimble/bin are
proxies that delegate to the real toolchain. choosenim then allows you
to change the active toolchain by reconfiguring the behaviour of the proxies.
The toolchains themselves are installed into ~/.choosenim/toolchains. For
example running nim will execute the proxy in ~/.nimble/bin/nim, which
in turn will run the compiler in ~/.choosenim/toolchains/nim-1.0.0/bin/nim,
assuming that 1.0.0 was selected.
choosenim downloads and installs the official release
binaries on Windows and Linux. On other
platforms, the official source release
is downloaded and built. This operation is only performed once when a new
version is selected.
As official binaries are made available for more platforms, choosenim will
install them accordingly.
| Windows | Linux | macOS (*) | |
|---|---|---|---|
| C compiler | Downloaded automatically | gcc/clang | gcc/clang |
| OpenSSL | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| curl | N/A | Any recent version (※) | Any recent version |
* Many macOS dependencies should already be installed. You may need to install a C compiler however. More information on dependencies is available here.
※ Some users needed to install libcurl4-gnutls-dev (see here)
Git is required when installing #HEAD or a specific commit of Nim. The unxz
binary is optional but will allow choosenim to download the smallest tarballs.
> choosenim -h
choosenim: The Nim toolchain installer.
Choose a job. Choose a mortgage. Choose life. Choose Nim.
Usage:
choosenim <version/path/channel>
Example:
choosenim 1.0.0
Installs (if necessary) and selects version 0.16.0 of Nim.
choosenim stable
Installs (if necessary) Nim from the stable channel (latest stable release)
and then selects it.
choosenim #head
Installs (if necessary) and selects the latest current commit of Nim.
Warning: Your shell may need quotes around `#head`: choosenim "#head".
choosenim ~/projects/nim
Selects the specified Nim installation.
choosenim update stable
Updates the version installed on the stable release channel.
choosenim versions [--installed]
Lists the available versions of Nim that choosenim has access to.
Channels:
stable
Describes the latest stable release of Nim.
devel
Describes the latest development (or nightly) release of Nim taken from
the devel branch.
Commands:
update <version/channel> Installs the latest release of the specified
version or channel.
show Displays the selected version and channel.
show path Prints only the path of the current Nim version.
update self Updates choosenim itself.
versions [--installed] Lists available versions of Nim, passing
`--installed` only displays versions that
are installed locally (no network requests).
Options:
-h --help Show this output.
-y --yes Agree to every question.
--version Show version.
--verbose Show low (and higher) priority output.
--debug Show debug (and higher) priority output.
--noColor Don't colorise output.
--choosenimDir:<dir> Specify the directory where toolchains should be
installed. Default: ~/.choosenim.
--nimbleDir:<dir> Specify the Nimble directory where binaries will be
placed. Default: ~/.nimble.
--firstInstall Used by install script.
Check out the analytics document for details.
MIT